Reynolda to Raise $5 Million in Capital Campaign: On Thursday night – between opera arias and Champagne toasts – officials at Reynolda House Museum of American Art kicked off the museum’s first capital campaign, which aims to raise $5 million, since it became affiliated with Wake Forest University in 2002.

Bringing Dead Economists Back to Life: Adam Smith on the Financial Crisis: Can Adam Smith provide answers to the challenges of the modern economy? To help answer this question, The Economist featured Wake Forest’s James Otteson, a professor of political economy and the editor of a new book, “What Adam Smith Knew, Moral Lessons on Capitalism from its Greatest Champions and Fiercest Opponents.” The article highlights Otteson’s expertise and references remarks he delivered at a lecture at the Harvard Club of New York on Jan. 21.

NCAA’s Top Conferences to Allow Additional Aid for Athletes: The wealthiest college-sports conferences, responding to pressure to provide additional benefits to players, approved new rules on Saturday strengthening the value of scholarships. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brad Wolverton writes, “The most significant change allows Division I colleges to cover their athletes’ full cost of attendance, which could put thousands of dollars more per year into players’ pockets. Colleges also backed a measure protecting students from losing their scholarships if they fail to meet coaches’ athletic expectations. New rules also give players the ability to borrow against potential future earnings by purchasing loss-of-value insurance.”

Brothers with ties to Wake Forest University create stock market competition: A student at Wake Forest University and his investment banker brother say they are bringing fantasy gaming to the finance industry. Lee Lowden, a Wake Forest senior, and William Lowden, who is a graduate of WFU, have co-founded Stock Battle, a pay-to-play fantasy stock market-competition platform at www.stockbattle.com.

Bat signal for blind example of campus innovations: Put together a professor who knows how bats fly in the dark, a computer scientist with a special-needs child looking for technologies that help people with disabilities adapt and students looking for real-world experience and you have one example of the inventions pouring out of American universities.

Recommended Resting: Napping students — exhausted by long nights of studying for exams or writing term papers — are common in campus libraries. But at Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library, sleeping students can now be found resting in comfortable recliners, instead of snoring into open textbooks…Wake Forest isn’t just concerned about the stress of students cramming for final exams in the library. In the last two years, the university has revamped its approach to addressing student well-being across campus — and it’s not the only institution trying to help students better-handle the stresses of college.

Wake Forest volunteers make meals for the hungry: This week more than 150 Wake Forest students, faculty and staff volunteers will cook about 400 made-from-scratch Thanksgiving meals and deliver them to nonprofit partner agencies who serve food-insecure residents in the Triad.

More colleges dropping the SAT requirement: Each fall, high school seniors nationwide begin the college application process, and many worry their SAT/ACT test scores will overshadow their academic achievements and talents. CBS Evening News featured first-year student Natalie Casimir in a story about the increasing number of colleges and universities making the SAT optional. In the story, she says she feels “valued, not by a number but for my character.”

Finding a Student’s Calling: In a recent Inside Higher Ed story on students seeking advice from campus chaplains on career direction, Wake Forest’s Vice President of Career Development Andy Chan had the opportunity to comment on the importance of finding the right path after college rather than just the first job.

While the process may be a little more philosophical, and even spiritual, than most career counseling, Chan said he’d like to see a similar focus at more colleges. “I think a lot of times, we get so focused on outcomes — do students have a job, do they go to grad school — that all the energy is focused just on what a student might be skilled at,” he said. “And sometimes that might take a student down a path that’s not the right fit for them as a person.”

“There’s a lot more pressure now on universities to demonstrate positive outcomes. How are the students doing in respect to getting jobs or going to graduate school? I think for a long time schools have not really spent too much resources in that area, and now there’s this sense that we need to make up for that,” said Chan.

One Sculptor’s Answer to WWI Wounds: Plaster, Coper and Paint: Sometimes art can change how people see the world. But Anna Coleman Ladd made art that changed how the world saw people. It was World War I, and soldiers were coming home from the battlefield with devastating injuries. Those who survived were often left with disfigured faces. “The part of the soldier’s body that was most vulnerable was his face, because if he looked up over a trench, that was the part that was going to be hit,” says David Lubin, a professor of art at Wake Forest University.

“These men couldn’t be seen on the street,” says Lubin. “They’d gone through multiple operations, and they were seen as so hideous people would sometimes pass out from seeing them.”